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Joe Wilkinson After College to Santa Fe
I worked at Baylor for a few months, then found a job at Wright Patterson AFB, training monkeys to shoot down airplanes. I got the job because in the interview, they showed me a monkey working the task “successfully”. The task involved a display of a light moving in a parabolic arc, simulating the trajectory of an enemy aircraft. The monkey’s task was to track the light to avoid shock. I pointed out to the assembled trainers, bosses, etc. that the light would quickly becfome a conditioned aversive stimulus, and the monkeys would quickly learn to track the shock. The trainers pointed out that was a problem in the past, but they had fixed the problem by pointing the monkey’s heads toward the light. Suppressing a laugh, I simply turned off the oscilloscope that produced the moving light, to the objections of the assembled trainers. Nothing happened. The animal continued working the task. I was hired. I came up with an alternative task that required attention to the light using state transitions in the design. It worked successfully. About halfway through training, one of the bosses, Carrol Day, asked me how things were going. I said, I’ve got some good news, some bad news, and some more good news. The first good news is that the animals can track the light. The baS news is that the airplane had to have a fuselage diameter of 200 feet. So Carrol asked, so what’s the good news? I said “look what a coup it would be if we shot down a 200 ft. airplane!” He failed to see the humor. After a year of the coldest winter in Dayton’s history, I got a job as Director of Institutional Studies at the newly-formed University of Texas at San Antonio. I kept the job for about six years before quitting to start my own company, Southwest Computing Services. It was an immediate success, as I landed contracts with Church’s Fried Chicken headquarters and some lesser-known outfits. At the time, I was a severe alcoholic, so I drank myself out of the company. I then moved to Houston and, with my dad’s help, built a house, where I lived for several years. I had a job with Wycoal Gas, a subsidiary of Panhandle Eastern Pipeline Company. When gas prices dropped, Panhandle shut down Wycoal, which depended on much higher gas prices to be profitable. Wycoal’s business was to build a huge coal gasification plant in Wyoming. I then went to work as a customer support rep at McAuto, a subsidiary of McDonnell Douglas aircraft company. This was the best job I ever had, before or since. It involved doing whatever the customers needed. Wehad a plotting program that only ran once for a given plot, then stopped. McAuto had lost the source code for the program, so I couldn’t apply the simple programming fix. So I wrote an assembly language program that executed the program once for each plot in the run. That worked well, and became McAuto’s permanent version of the program. The most significant event at McAuto was that took a month off to quit drinking. That was successful, and I haven’t had a drink of alcohol since. A rumor started that McAuto was going to close all remote offices, so we all started to look for options. Not wanting to move to St. Louis, McAuto’s home, I decided to move. Working from a short-list that included Santa Fe and Boulder, CO. I picked Santa Fe, and I’ve been here since.